Pinterest, Shinola and Shazam Go to Market Faster with Smartling

Smartling’s technology enables ambitious brands to reach customers around the globe with native brand experiences that resonate and drive conversions in multiple markets. It does this by automating and streamlining the translation and localization of content, making a once long and arduous process virtually painless.

Don’t believe the pain can be taken out of translation and localization? Check out the success stories below.

Pinterest helps people all over the world discover the things they love and inspires them to incorporate those things into their everyday lives. The company strives to deliver a universal experience to its 100 million users worldwide.

“We’re very focused on educating users around the globe, and we want Pinterest to feel authentic to Pinners regardless of where they reside, so translation and localization is a key part of the discovery process,” says Silvia Oviedo-López, Localization & International Operations at Pinterest.

The company was looking for translation management software that would increase its speed to market without affecting the quality of translations and would also give it the flexibility to deliver updates simultaneously to the 31 languages Pinterest serves.

“Working with Smartling’s Global Fluency Platform has also eliminated a number of daily localization tasks, once required of our engineers, freeing up their time to work on other projects,” recalls Oviedo-López.

Since implementing the Global Fluency Platform, Pinterest has seen a six-fold improvement in its translation time-to-market from 48 hours to less than eight. Going forward, Pinterest will continue to focus on quality for each of the 31 languages its content supports with an eye toward deepening its presence in key markets.

When Shinola, a modern manufacturer of classic high-end watches, bicycles, leather goods, and journals, began the process of launching itself as a global brand in late 2013, the company knew that translation and localization would be an integral part of its global go-to-market strategy. Shinola was in the midst of opening its first European store in London and thought it would be the perfect time to begin localizing its website.

“We are very careful about how our brand and products are presented and described, and maintaining a consistent voice is essential,” says Ryan Shaltry, Senior Technical Developer/Architect at Shinola. “We also wanted to offload the management of translations away from our application architecture to a compatible specialized system.”

Shinola was on a tight timeline to launch its international website and Smartling’s technology presented the company with a solution that could meet that timeline without consuming internal resources. Additionally, Smartling’s Global Delivery Network mitigated the need to make drastic changes to Shinola’s existing infrastructure.

The Shinola brand is relatively new in Europe, but even so, since launching in seven languages and 15 countries, the company has seen an increase in traffic to its site and sales in international markets.

“Since adopting Smartling’s technology, we now consider the international angle with every product, piece of content, or new site feature we implement. It is amazing how much more we are able to do with the same personnel,” says Shaltry.

Shazam is a mobile app for smartphones, tablet computers and wearable devices that helps people to discover, explore and share the music and TV they love. The company needs to make sure its subscribers can easily navigate those apps and its website to get to the digital, editorial and support content they want quickly – irrespective of the language they speak.

Having its content available in up to 25 different languages around the clock is vital to Shazam’s success. To ensure faster time-to-market for its global content, the company turned to Smartling’s Global Fluency Platform in 2013 to replace the spreadsheet-based localization process previously in place.

The key to Shazam’s success has been its ability to leverage Smartling’s API to automate the flow of content through the process, which gives it the flexibility needed to meet the company’s growing translation needs.

Learn more

Visit Smartling’s Resources Page to access all three success stories as well as other valuable content including white papers, ebooks, videos, and product briefs.